234 TRANSACTIONS OF THE 



The Log of a Merchant Officer. By Robert Metiiuen. Ac- 

 count of the Elenheim Hurricane, &c. : 1 volume, imperial folio. 

 London, 1854. 



The weather, the most important, the most universally inter- 

 esting of all sublunary themes, painfully interferes with our every 

 day duties and enjoyments. It predominates with a despotic 

 sway over all our most important physical wants, and famine and 

 pestilence are among the scourges which it wields, &c. The fool 

 and the philosopher are on a par in their weather wisdom ; and 

 the accumulated knowledge of past ages does not yet enable us, 

 as it did tlie Pharisees of old, to discern the face. This branch 

 of natural science has been less studied than any other — certainly 

 a strange fact. 



One of the earliest attempts to establish registers of the weather,, 

 on an extensive scale, was made by the Royal Society of Edin- 

 burgli, in 1820. 



The Commissioner of the Land Office of the United States, (Jo- 

 siah Meigs,) had some years before tl^at caused exact meteorolo- 

 gical tables to be kept throughout the United States, and trans- 

 mitted to him every month. 



A very gre.at impulse was given to this subject by the interest 

 excited by the publication of Professor Hansteen, of Christiana's 

 celebrated work on the Magnetism of the Earth, and his subse- 

 quent investigation of the intensity of magnetic force in different 

 parts of the globe. First made known in England in 1820. The 

 importance of these observations was first observed by the distin- 

 guished Danish philosopher Professer Oersted of Copenhagen, who 

 visited Edinburgh in June 1823, and brought with him the very 

 magnetic needle which Prosessor Hansteen had intrusted to dif- 

 ferent philosophers, who determined with it the time of three 

 hundred oscillations in various parts of Norway, Sweden, Den- 

 mark, Prussia and France. Baron Humboldt attracted by his 

 experiments went to see them, at St, Petersburg, in 1829, and 

 urged the French Academy of Science to institute hourly obser- 

 vations on the variations in declination of the magnetical needle 

 during two consecutive days. 



In 1830, such observations were made at St. Petersburg, Kazan, 

 Miolaieff and Sitka, and at Pekin. In 1834, three magnetic and 

 meteorological observatories were constructed at Catherinebourg, 

 Barnavoul and Nertschinck, and other three solely for meteo- 

 rology were established at Bpgoslowsk, Zlatvoost and Lougan. 



Baron Humboldt's letter to the Duke of Sussex, in 183(), caused 

 England to establish observatories at Kew, Greenwich, Dublin, 



